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ChapterTwenty-One
Reese
Then
There are few places more ulcer-inducing for the Secret Service than New York City. Downtown Kabul, maybe. The middle of a war zone.
Managing the advance for the United Nations General Assembly every September is one of the biggest jobs in the Service. We need to replicate the protective bubble of the White House, one of the most controlled and hardened locations on earth, in a miasma of unpredictability as secure as Jell-O. One hundred and ninety-three heads of government come to Manhattan, and each one receives a combination of State Department Diplomatic Security Service and Secret Service protection. The New York field office preps and plans for this event 365 days a year.
I’m in New York to smooth together the detail and the rest of the Service’s operations. Normally, this is a job I do from the White House. I don’t need to be throwing my weight around in person. This isn’t my turf, but I have seniority since I’m the guy next to Brennan Walker.
I drove up scant hours after I fled the Residence, checking out an SUV and hitting the road before dawn. The taste of Brennan lingers on my lips, and the cologne he wore for the State Dinner clings to me like he’s only an inch away.
Distance. That’s what I—we—need. This thing between us is too wild, too unpredictable.
I shouldn’t be hurling rules and regulations out the window, but he makes me do exactly that. He makes me want to shed this job like a snake’s skin, become a man who could climb the stairs of the Residence and take his hand at any time of the day or night. Or be someone who doesn’t have to manufacture excuses to spend time together, like running in the early morning or going to see his secretary to get a glimpse of him through his office door.
I am bad for Brennan Walker. Everything we’ve done—everything I’ve done—could tear him down. Destroy him.
Pas bon. You have to stay away from him.
Protect him from everything.
Especially yourself.
* * *
Henry must have gottencalls from the New York field office bitching about how I’m running roughshod over the team up here. Look, I don’t care that the radios were checked last week. Check them again. Check the evacuation routes. Check the hotel staff’s background clearances. Check the motor pool and the garages. Check—
He puts Sheridan on an afternoon flight to JFK with orders to glue himself to me.
I’m secretly thankful. When I’m alone, I’m spinning. Quiet reminds me of the layers Brennan cloaks himself in.
We meet up outside the hotel, and I take Sheridan on a walking tour of the security arrangements before he can set down his bags. The Secret Service is taking over ten of the fifty-five stories in one of the most exclusive hotels in the city, one mile from United Nations headquarters, for two weeks.
Brennan will be staying here for two nights.
The New York office has already run through the hotel with sniffer dogs and metal detectors, electronic sweepers, and portable X-ray machines. After Brennan’s suite was declared clean, the entire floor was sealed, and an agent stands guard twenty-four hours a day.
When Brennan arrives, the floor will be his alone. The detail is divided between the floors directly above and below Brennan. The next seven floors below all belong to the president’s staff.
Sheridan is as wide-eyed as ever. Before this, the closest he ever came to any presidential action was washing the SUVs for the motorcade.
And our illicit midnight run.
We’re the first out-of-town agents to arrive, and our rooms are right next door to each other. “Ditch your stuff and change. I’m taking you to dinner.”
I’m going a mile a minute, trying to stay busy, trying to keep my mind racing. Anything to not think of Brennan.
What is Brennan doing right now? Is he, like me, reliving our stolen time? Playing each kiss we shared backward and forward, or remembering the fog-shrouded afternoon when we memorized the shape of each other’s lips?
Or has he realized the two of us are nothing but a bad moon climbing in the darkness?
I talk Sheridan’s ear off at a pub on Madison, trying to fill him with good advice. He hangs on my every word. As he downs his third beer, the hero worship in his gaze sharpens and shifts.
I would not have recognized the look in his eyes before.
Before—before I saw that shine in my own reflection, before I struggled with the rising flood of my own attraction to Brennan—I would have blown right over the way Sheridan’s eyes drop to my lips, how his cheeks and the hollow of his throat turn as pink as a Gulf sunset. The way he tries to cover and conceal his feelings, shy and bold in equal measures.
